Yesterday I wrote about the role the agricultural revolution played in oppressing women. While exploring that subject, I ended up wandering off on a rather large tangent that I eventually deleted when it became large enough to sufficiently defocus the essay. But I think it’s a sufficiently interesting to discuss it here.
Jared Diamond has made the argument in several books and essays — most notably Guns, Germs, and Steel — that the move from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies was the “worst mistake” in history. To support this conclusion, he cites various evidence which indicates that the larger families of early agricultural societies actually resulted in poorer nutrition, hygiene, and even longevity compared to the hunter-gatherer societies they replced.
But Diamond’s thesis makes little sense: No one would willingly choose a less appealing lifestyle. Diamond argues that these societies were “forced” into this lifestyle due to their inability to control their birth rates. But this contradicts the known facts: For tens or hundreds of thousands of years, mankind was able to regulate their birth rates just fine while continuing to live in hunter-gatherer societies. And, in fact, modern hunter-gatherer societies manage to similarly regulate their birth rates.
I suspect the reality is that the agricultural lifestyle was preferred specifically because it allowed for larger families. This is a point of view which is probably difficult for a scholar from the latter half of the 20th century to understand, given that contemporary western society puts a very low premium on children compared to previous epochs of history.
Oh, we still like our children… we just tend to like them in moderation. The idea of a single woman bearing 20 children seems unspeakably alien and even slightly distasteful to most of us… but would seem incredibly desirable to most cultures of recorded history.
So those early farmers may have been hungry, dirty, and short-lived… but it wasn’t a mistake. They were gaining something that they valued even more.
This is a great reflection, where you try to make sense of a foolish decision. You rightly point out that people wouldn’t take bad gambles. It’s possible you may no longer believe this, since it was published 12 years ago. This is especially the case given that in that period of time, we’ve had plenty of other literature that covers the same topic with different focuses.
One of the most popular examples is Harari’s book Homo Sapiens. There, he describes how the transition from hunting-gathering happened. It was gradual. It was subtle. It made us want more of the plants we started domesticating. And little by little, as we were both enchanted by the ease of this lifestyle and simultaneously started creating cultures to reflect the times, we settled for agricultural life. It just so happened that that enchanting lifestyle was riddled with problems. But we didn’t see that. The change was too gradual, spanning generations.
The effect of this gradual change can be understood in many ways. One is that the new farmers could not think of another way of living, given their ancestors likely had similar lifestyles —again, since this change was so gradual. The stories these farmers heard of their origins as a cultural group legitimized the agrarian lifestyle. Another perspective is that, even if people could choose, it could have been a similar choice between cheap calories and slow food. Most people can understand the links between cheap calories and worse health, but our biology, culture, infrastructure, as well as our economic and political systems collude to make it possible for Coke to be in almost every menu, every store, and not be questioned enough for it to disappear. Too bad it’s killing us and making our lives worse. But we’re stuck here regardless.
I remember reading somewhere that early states were extremely reliant on slavery, to the extent that the upper class would periodically have to go out and capture new peasants to replace the ones that had run away to go be hunter gatherers again.